IS KIMMEL FIT TO BE LATE-NIGHT KING?

ABC will take the gamble in January

In announcing that it would give Jimmy Kimmel the plum late-night time slot for which he’s been patiently waiting about a decade, ABC set up one of those Great Circle of Life stories to which its parent company, Disney, is so addicted.

In this version, NBC’s Jay Leno and CBS’s Dave Letterman are the old lion kings of late-night talk TV who are losing their grip on the kingdom. NBC’s Jimmy Fallon is Simba — maybe CBS’s Craig Ferguson is, too, although the press doesn’t seem to think so, which might say more about the press than it does about Ferguson.

And Kimmel, who has waited around for a chance at the 11:35 p.m. throne longer than those other two squirts — he celebrates his 10th anniversary with ABC late night in January — he’s Scar.

Letterman and Leno have both had great runs, Letterman as host of CBS’s “Late Show” since ’93, and Leno as host of NBC’s iconic “Tonight Show” since ’92 (with a brief timeout in late ’09 and early ’10, when Conan O’Brien tried, and failed, to dethrone him.

(Ironically, ABC made plays for both guys — Letterman in 2002, a plan that got scuttled when word broke out that the network had approached Letterman about replacing respected newsman Ted Koppel and his iconic news mag “Nightline,” and much media outrage erupted. And Leno in ’08, when he was being stripped of “The Tonight Show” so that NBC could hang on to Conan, and ABC offered him a home, only Leno decided to wait it out at NBC, which paid off.)

Now it’s 2012, and both Letterman and Leno’s late-night shows are tired, ratings-wise. This season, to date, Letterman’s averaging 3 million viewers, and Leno 3.8 million — millions fewer than they were less than a decade ago.

Both men are finishing behind ABC’s “Nightline,” although that three-decade-old news mag is also clocking far fewer viewers than it did less than a decade back.

Even so, it looks as though both guys will get to leave on their own terms. Letterman recently signed for two more years at CBS. And NBC is not expected to make a move before Leno’s contract comes up in fall 2013, while the network continues to lick its wounds over its botched effort to replace Leno with the younger, hipper O’Brien — who wound up being too young and too hip for flyover country. (NBC parent Comcast did, however, slash 20 of Leno’s staffers this month, and Leno agreed to take a pay cut to keep Comcast from slashing any more.)

So, this week, ABC announced that it was making a calculated gamble and giving Kimmel — who recently celebrated a July sweep ratings performance up 14 percent compared with July ’11 — the 11:35 p.m. time slot, starting in January.

This presumably gives Kimmel, 44, about two years to get settled at 11:35 — against the sexagenarians — before the younger crop of hosts moves in at NBC and CBS.